Money managers are hungrier than ever for obscure data to give them an edge

• Investment manager spending on alternative data jumped to $2.8 billion last year, according to Neudata.
• It is a 17% jump from the prior year, the data consultancy's report reads.
• Alternative data includes non-traditional intel sources, including credit-card receipts, cellphone geolocation data, and more.

Sophisticated money managers have long turned to intel from credit-card receipts or satellite images of retailers' parking lots into an investing edge, but this data is increasingly becoming table stakes.

Hedge funds and other money managers spent $2.8 billion on alternative data in 2025, according to a new report from consultancy Neudata, a 17% jump from the year before. It's more than double what asset managers spent on alternative data in 2021, which includes a wide range of non-traditional information sources.

The report projects that the total spend on alternative datasets could jump to more than $23 billion in the consultancy's bull case in 2030 and just under $8 billion in the bear case. The driver for this growth — and how much will come over the rest of the decade — will be based on how many new entrants, both buyers and sellers, enter the market, Daryl Smith, head of research at Neudata, said.

"Plenty of funds have only stuck their toes in," Smith said, and "several hundred" new datasets were launched last year alone.

AI is also changing how funds consume and ingest alternative data sources, the report notes.

Now that structuring and cleaning raw data has become a faster, cheaper task thanks to AI tools, asset managers are looking for direct hook-ups to alternative data vendors' feeds. It's also opened up alt data to a range of managers that were once unable to pull meaningful insights from the data because of technical challenges.

These new funds could be a big driver of the industry's growth in the coming years, from the demand side, Smith said.

More companies could be selling data

Some new data vendors might not be start-ups that stumbled onto something intriguing, but instead familiar brand names. Established corporations that have seen web-scraping bots take their data to sell are now getting into the game, Smith said.

He said Neudata's consulting team, which helps new buyers and sellers navigate the market, has gotten outreach from big-name companies recently, though he said he couldn't reveal the names of the potential sellers. Trustpilot, the consumer review website, is one example of a firm that has begun selling its data and has presented at Neudata conferences in the past, Smith said.

Unsurprisingly, data sources tracking the growth of artificial intelligence were in high demand last year. The report points out vendors such as Aterio, which track data center construction and power usage, for example.

Still, the most popular type of dataset, of which there are thousands, is web-scraping offerings, which accounted for 15% of the total spend in 2025, roughly in line with 2024.